


Sublimation

by ThunderheadFred



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Angst, Comfort Sex, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 04:37:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9162325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThunderheadFred/pseuds/ThunderheadFred
Summary: It is his turn now, he realizes. His half of the conversation. The time to say ‘I agree.’





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2011.
> 
> This was posted on fanfiction.net under a different pseudonym before I deleted my ancient account a few years back. Several people have reached out via [tumblr](http://thunderheadfred.tumblr.com) to tell me they enjoyed this story, so I wanted to post an archival version.

The entire world has been abandoned.

Nothing has prepared him for this. Nothing could.

They have breached the taiga; the belt of pine trees that circles the world, and the cold is like a knife, like handfuls of needles. Every fifty miles or so it is possible to make out the faint outline of an empty town, each one drifting past silently like a ghost. Places that have not seen their keepers for two decades, the buildings all gaping and overcome by time. Where roads and streetlights might once have signaled some rural speck of humanity, now are meandering white snow drifts and unfamiliar animal tracks. Howling wind and darkness like he has never seen; impenetrable, indecipherable, incomprehensible.

He remembers vividly - without reason, unbidden and unwanted - suddenly remembers.

Fighting his way from the infested bowels of Black Mesa; survival. Panic.

No training manual for the apocalypse. Finding a service elevator after hours of tortured mania, stumbling into that ninety-four-degree heat for a disbelieving breath of fresh New Mexico sunlight. Sunblind, irreverent foolishness. Immediately DAT DAT DAT DAT across the shoulder; a spray of red hot 9×19mm Parabellum. He had come out of the elevator straight into the business end of a startled United States Marine who was in all likelihood just trying to pay his way through college and had no interest in shooting science personnel.

But too late, that muscle memory had kicked in. The Marine had shot him in the shoulder. Without pausing for breath, Gordon shot him right back. Shot him in the face, in the left cheek underneath a startled brown eye. Instinctual after all that fighting below, after every abomination. Like a trick knee. BAM, a bullet in his face.

Not in the head, but in his face. Vegetables had heads; cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce. Men have faces; and the face that Gordon had blown apart had looked confused. And young.

Gordon's HEV suit had caught the soldier's rounds, but even so, the delicate mesh of the under-layer was no defense against a stray shard of driven shrapnel. Something burning and horrible burrowed into Gordon’s neck and had taken hold there. Hours later while raiding an overturned vending machine that was crawling with segmented alien cockroaches, he had discovered how much it hurt to swallow. Later still, he fumbled stupidly on a ledge, landed poorly on an already twisted ankle, shouted without thinking. That had taught him - through a unique experience granted only to those with military-grade materials embedded in their throats - the true meaning of the word _torn._

After that, he did not bother with speaking. In the end, it simplified matters; there was no need to worry about what he ought to say after murdering man after man after man. There could be no apologies for that. No painless, soft-spoken absolution. Only blown-apart faces and the leftover meat of people who had just been doing their jobs. People whose limbs fell out of monsters in the ceiling, leaving knots of flesh in his hair. What could he say after realizing the blood in his mouth was not his own?

Silence was easier. Or it had been. Until now.

Here, it is the easiness itself that seems wrong; the simpleness. The meaningless gaping blank of it all.

It is one thing to keep his mouth shut and carry on through the scream of alien battle-cries, the roar of unfamiliar weapons and death. Now, every human voice is banished and distant. Gordon doubts he can stay silent much longer in this cold, breathless void. He coughs to test the machinery of his voice; it is a jagged and unfriendly sound, and it hurts. Alyx jumps, looks over at him from the chopper controls, reacting to the first willful noise he has ever made in her presence. Dissatisfied, not sure exactly what he had been expecting, he turns back to the landscape. Stares at the desolate emptiness beneath.

Surrounded by human beings - no matter how broken or abused - it had been easier. Easier to ignore the few remaining scraps of evidence, the vague half-remembered outline of just how darkly the tide had turned. A few newspaper clippings. Sloppy lines of graffiti too blown apart and crumbling to discern. Some overheard conversations. Still, there had been an edifice to cling to within the corroded stronghold of City 17, where the new world order was everywhere. Though it was ugly, malformed, and inhuman, it was order nonetheless, an illusion of society.

Breen’s doing, and hardly a surprise. It was like stepping into Orwell, or Atwood. A brutish post-apocalyptic, military-state fairy tale straight out of an undergraduate literature course, almost too Big Brother to believe. An easy solution. If easy was the right kind of word. Maybe there was no such word, or maybe Gordon had been speechless too long to remember it. He had no way of quantifying a world where it was less complicated to shoot bullets into living, thinking beings than to sit here in the terrible lonely silence of winter and realize that his species had forfeited its six-million-year rein upon the Earth.

All of it gone. Gone forever in seven hours.

Even God had required seven days to do his work.

Run. Run. Run. Run. Run. He has not slept for twenty years.

They are both tired; it is not safe to keep pressing forward like this. The Combine is scattered, their communications crippled, they will be unable to track them in these blind, remote stretches of what was once human civilization. A fight is surely waiting for them, but not here. Alyx stares fixedly at the horizon; her gaze locked on a dawn that is hours away, her thoughts so crystalline that he can feel them behind his eyes, forceful, like gravity. Borealis.

He knows that she is looking forward, looking ahead, not because she wants to but because it is the opposite of looking back. Behind. Just over their shoulders where they had bundled her father in rough military blankets and gently laid him out like cargo. Not her father, though. Not anymore. Eli is gone, leaving a body that just lies there heavily, prone and obvious, a niggling in the back of the mind, Death. They need to bury him.

He can see an approaching stretch of abandoned buildings, so he grips the back of her chair with a creaking leather warning, and when she finally looks over he delivers a look so forceful that she turns away immediately, surrendering. She sets down in the middle of a town square, gaudily, almost. Right in the center of the place, next to an old fountain and a statue of a horse.

A rusty black helicopter clumsily parked downtown like a punchline.

It is an old village with an indecipherable Cyrillic name; a mid nineteenth century lumber town nestled in the clutches of the Russian wilderness. Now that the helicopter engine is dead, the silence is thick. It is something solid; a presence he can feel leaning on his shoulders like the pelt of some mighty slaughtered thing.

First things first. Not even a bathroom break. They haul out the body and try to find a place, a nice place, a place Eli might have given half a smile and a chuckle over, if he had been there to help. Thankfully the moon is bright; not full, but fierce enough to see by, strong enough to cast strange, sharp shadows across the ground. On the edge of town right behind what looks to be a hardware store they spot a circle of small dark trees, a peaceful alcove of pine. The soil is frozen solid, there is no way to bury him. So without ever deciding how or why, they start to work. It takes about three quarters of an hour.

For Eli’s body they build a strange little snow globe; a solitary residence for the empty case that was until recently a great man. Reduced to his basest components; a fraction. E. V.

They arrange him there, soft and silent in the tiny ice barrow. A ‘tumulus,’ Gordon might have said ages ago, with one of those not-quite-likeable grins belonging to people who enjoy showing off their vocabulary. To match his glasses, Barney used to say.

No one says anything now.

At least we didn’t leave him there, Alyx seems to whisper. It is in the way she is not crying, in the somewhat resigned look in her eye. One last act of resistance for the stalwart Doctor Vance; not to be left rotting in that horrible place next to the corpses of a dozen striders and the bitter smell of rocket fuel.

With Eli interred, it is just the two of them. Gordon and Alyx. Alone but together.

Alyx is the first to turn away. She readjusts the gray-green parka that is her only shelter from the violent cold and suddenly walks toward the town square, picking up a small crate of supplies from the chopper.

No fuss.

Just like this place they have found. No fuss. Nothing has been boarded up, the doors are unlocked. Everything is exactly as it might have been at 11:00 in the morning every standard Tuesday. He tries the front entrance to the pharmacy, the plate glass storefront frosted like primordial Christmas. The door opens wide through the cold white dust like a snow angel, the bell dings. Revealed are narrow rows of cereal, a make-up counter, boxes of everyday matter that are sleeping; waiting for a florescent light, for a cash register, for a customer.

It was as if in one single moment of annoyance, the entire populace had called a meeting and civilly walked out of town in hopes of finding someplace more temperate. But no one had walked anywhere, had they? There were little clues, hard to see beneath two decades of unforgiving winters, but hints nonetheless. Smashed cars under a blanket of frost and rounded snow. The occasional cleanly-broken window, a neighboring wall splattered with bullets. The strange shape of alien bones jutting into the moonlight; bullsquid sculls, vortigaunt femurs. And scattered along the sidewalks were undisturbed mounds of ice that had frozen and thawed, frozen and thawed, frozen and thawed, until all that remained were the vaguest estimations of what a human being might have been, like a volumetric gauge.

Not the Combine’s work, too fearful and panicked. He recognizes this handwriting, it is like his own. Ordinary people who had rolled out of bed and been late to work. Ordinary people trying to understand how a portal to Hell had opened and released a thousand screaming horrors.

This is why the world has been abandoned, he realizes, when he accidentally steps on the mangled remains of someone consumed. Because it has not been abandoned at all. It has been devoured. By Xen.

Next to the sawmill is a small but hardy building; the contractor’s apartment, probably. Even more so than the rest of the town, this single structure has been built to endure. It looks as if it has been standing there stubbornly forever, as if it were the founding father of all things North, just daring the wilderness to try and take it back.

Alyx is kicking the front door, but it has frozen stiff and will not budge. She’s been outside too long, Gordon realizes. The HEV suit and its addictive hush of morphine have made him stupid, ignorant of his own breakability; the fragility of human bodies, the susceptible flesh, the pain. He watches Alyx shiver as she butts her shoulder against the door, sees the warning red glow on her face, the unsteady smoke of her breath rising weakly through the wind. The suit marks a spike in his heart rate; a measurement of worry.

As if waking unexpectedly from a dream, he bolts to her side and moves her out of the way with one stoic tap of the crowbar to her arm. The crowbar jimmies in just above the ice-lacquered lock and he shoves, WHAM, until the wood gives way with a tired, ancient creak.

Everything is covered in a life-age of dust, cold has permeated every surface, but the room is dry. By some force of incredible construction, the roof has held together and the windows have frozen shut, locking out the endless drifts of snow. The air is tainted with a dim scent of mildew and decay; he knows that as the night goes on and the room thaws, that smell will get worse. The living room and kitchen are packed into one utilitarian space, with a tiny bathroom to one side, a bedroom to the other, and a door to the root cellar at the back of the house. He can hear a mournful whistling down there, the basement window has caved in and brought home the wind.

There is still wood in the fire, some pots on a tiny stove, and an open book lying face-down on a dilapidated sofa. Everything is just a shade too small, as if it had all been built for people half a foot shorter, people of a previous century without good food or gym class. Gordon catches himself worrying that the homeowner will walk in at any minute and demand an explanation. It is a brief but friendly delusion, he is sad to let it go.

Alyx is shivering now. He pilots her to the sofa, presses her down with one hand, no protests. Crowbar again, this time to pry open the crate of supplies. A first aid kit, matches, snap-activated heating pads, some thermal blankets. A few unpalatable meal bars; he knows they are unpalatable because he has been eating them for days. He smacks a few glow sticks against the sharp edge of his right thigh, the room is lit with nauseous orange.

Pulled against her chest, Alyx’s hands are shaking; gloves soaked through from working in the snow outside. He grips a plastic-sealed thermal blanket in his teeth and tucks the crowbar under his arm, grabs her hands. Peeling off the gloves reveals the chapped and throbbing skin underneath. Brow darkening, he shakes his head and bites open the package, cocoons her inside the thermal blanket like a scrap of meat hidden in tinfoil.

Stupid, to deal with the dead first.

He doesn’t know how fast he can get a fire going. He doesn’t know how to ration survival equipment, or how to fend off frostbite, or how to stop Alyx from sinking further into this desperate trembling. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he has never been one of those rugged survival types. Never went on wilderness retreats, never tried fishing, was only dragged camping once; in an RV where he fought the whole time with his kid brother John over the fold-out sofa-bed. John would probably know how to deal with a cold cabin in the wilderness. Even if he didn’t, he could probably crack one hell of a joke about it.

Gordon stills, the thought of his brother suddenly terrorizing him. Dazed, he steps away from Alyx as if part of the ceiling has come down over his head. The crowbar falls to the carpet with a heavy, sinking thud.

Half-crazy John, who hates science but loves motorcycles, who is a persistently hilarious little shit, who is always buying Gordon coffee just so he can yammer at him uninterrupted. They shared stupid grins over sixteen-ounce straight-black Seattle Washington depth charges, a drink so caffeinated that Gordon would piss like a racehorse for days.

NASA didn’t land on the Moon, Gordon. JFK is still alive, Gordon. That TA of yours was in a porno, Gordon.

Shut up, John.

John Freeman. Still living with their parents in Seattle, still trying to figure out just what major to settle on, still sending blatantly vulgar E-mails to Gordon’s company account as if hoping to get him fired. Still.

Gordon knows his brother is no longer still.

America is gone. Whatever had survived the fallout of the Black Mesa bombing had been quickly eaten up by the portal storms and the first wave of the Combine. The entire population of the continental United States had been reduced to three cities; aptly named and numbered in the chronological order of their establishment. Overflow was then shipped out cross the oceans, mixed in with the rest of humanity in other numbered megatropoli.

There is no more New Mexico. No Los Angeles, no New York. Washington is just an empty carcass now. No one is ordering coffee or going to college.

And here in this abandoned corpse of a house, Gordon is suddenly at a loss. He has no idea if the old wood in the fireplace is still viable, or if the chimney is too backed up to be safe. Maybe they will asphyxiate on smoke, or the house will burn down if he tries to light a fire. No idea if Alyx has already been damaged beyond repair, if her lovely fingers will blacken and fall off one-by-one. No idea if Eli will stay dead out there in the night, or if he will come back howling and lurching for their blood, demanding yet another bullet in another face.

Gordon has no idea what to do, and irrationally, childishly, he hopes that the phone will ring and that it will be the teasing voice of John on the line, saying something comfortably impossible.

There was no Seven Hour War, Gordon.

Feigning intent, he grabs a blanket from the armchair in the corner; a dusty rag of a quilt that is rigid with cold. He shakes it out, violent; frustration echoing with a deep snap of fabric, and then bundles it around Alyx’s shoulders. Uncertain, he jerks slightly towards the door. Needing to move, to do something useful, to get more supplies. But leaving her in this shivering, vulnerable state - even for the five minutes it might take, even though she’s the most capable person he’s ever met - it seems like a terrible risk. He stands her on her feet and pokes, prods until she is hopping weakly from foot to foot, until she is nodding. Until she gets it. Keep moving. Run run run run run.

In the chopper he discovers a surprising variety of cold weather supplies; it occurs to Gordon once again that he is the only person in this equation who is not prepared, who has no idea what is coming next. Mossman and Eli had been chasing Aperture’s tail for years. To them, the Borealis was more than an urban myth, more than another ridiculous press explosion for a terminally strange CEO to sort out.

Gordon finds what he is hoping for and then some. Fresh clothes, parkas, snow gear and goggles, fuel, heaters, lamps, an incredible stockpile of signal flares. Opening a box that he hopes might be full of canned goods, he finally alights upon the stockpile of munitions. Shoulders tense, teeth grinding together, he surveys. Boxes of grenades and trip mines, crates of ammo, a rack bolted to the fuselage that is dripping with automatic weapons. A reminder, and not a gentle one, that the fight is far from over.

He takes what he needs and is walking back to the house when he sees it; a dark stain in the snow at the base of the steps. Red. Glittering. Something bloodied and dead. His breath dissipates in a cloud of hot terror and he is motionless, eyes lingering on that shadow. There had been no sound, no warning of a struggle. Surely she would have screamed, called out for help... He is too tired, he must be seeing things.

A glimmer of silver thermal blanket winks around the shape, rustling in the wind. It can’t be... can’t be... Impossible... not after everything...

Not like this.

God almighty, it is painful. His whole body trembles with it, a tumultuous wave of fear that rocks him head to toe. Her name rips out of his throat with a rattle, with a gasp.

“ALYX!”

Her name becomes solid in the air, an exhaled cloud of panic drifting through the night, echoing.

He can’t move.

Can’t possibly move.

Can’t look, can’t stomach the sight of her body ripped open again, knowing that this time there will be no mystical extraterrestrial rescuers waiting in the wings. No Deus ex Machina. His chest feels volatile, his rib cage barely holding together, he has become a vast space filled with tar and millions of years of rot. He has fossilized.

Muffled steps thunder from inside the house and the door bangs open. A figure stands heaving in the doorway, and for a brief, delirious instant, he thinks to himself, “I hope you kill me too.”

But Gordon and Alyx are the only people left in this part of the world, and the woman gaping at him from the top of the steps could only be her, the last person in the world. The last. Alyx.

Alive. She’s alive. Whatever this thing is at her feet, it’s just another in a long line of bodies that mean nothing.

Her eyes are wide and she is clutching a kitchen knife, her right arm dripping with blood.

“I was... checking... T-There was... a wolf...” she gasps, still trying to catch her breath. “A headcrab wolf... in the cellar. All... A-All clear.”

The phrase “headcrab wolf” passes in one ear and out the other, he can’t stomach the thought of such an animal, so the concept simply phases through his brain like solar radiation, leaving a hole but no memory. There is only one important thing that registers, and that is Alyx.

Somewhat dazed and stupid, she asks, “Was that you?”

Referring to the broken, horrible noise he had made.

Who else?

He shoulders her aside, staring into some unfathomable point in space, carrying the supplies into the house. Was that you? The burning wound in his throat yearns to confirm it. Yet no matter how preposterous, it must have been someone, anyone else that had released that terrible cry. Perhaps some strange Xenian bird, or the mournful ghost of Eli Vance. Anyone but Gordon Freeman, whose voice was unfamiliar even to himself. A man who had managed to show about as much external emotion about the end of the world as most people show about a bad Sunday morning.

“Gordon?”

He doesn’t answer.

Leaning over the dining room table, he works silently as is his custom, setting out the new inventory with precision. Composure, the only thing he has left. As if being silent - being thoughtless and blank, just being and little else - will help him figure out how to survive just one more night, one more hour, one more second. Lamps, glow sticks, two small space heaters. Heavy flannel clothes. Jackets. Blankets. Water. He arranges everything neatly, takes stock. If only for an instant, he had believed that Alyx had died for these things. For that reason alone, he cannot help but hate them.

It is her hand that does him in, the left one, the bloodless one. A gentle, concerned touch to the back of his head, no one has ever touched him there, not like that, not with intention. Encased as he is in the HEV, there is no other part of him to touch. No hand to pat or shoulder to squeeze, no spare passageway for human compassion.

Skin to skin; the first contact he’s had in a lifetime.

It bubbles up from what feels like his sacral bone, a seizure of emotion that nearly knocks him sideways. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts like he can’t believe, gasping desperately for air, his diaphragm heaving, sternum throbbing with a foreign ache, chest opening like a maw. Because his glasses are the only thing he can dislodge, he snatches them from his face, slams them onto the yoke of a quilted parka as if his tasteless, boring frames are somehow to blame for everything. And maybe they are. Kleiner pulled strings; had gotten his favorite student a cushy posting at Black Mesa when by all rights Gordon should have been punching numbers at some institute with the rest of the post-doctorates. But Kleiner had always liked him, always liked his glasses. Buddy Holly jokes on the sidelines of seminars. “That’ll be the day, Freeman!” he would say.

That’ll be the day, Freeman. It brings tears to his eyes, an acid-hot pain. Searing. He hisses. The first time he has cried in years, and he is not really crying but doing some baser, primal thing. Weeping, wailing, sobbing... not enough. It is a gasping, feeble overtaking, the only important emotion he has ever felt. Every other experience; every hope and disappointment, every bruised ego or ruptured dream, nothing like this. His entire life has gone pale in an instant, a thin, gauzy fleece blown back by this heavy metal ingot of a feeling.

The HEV is squawking and trying to administer some anti-psychotic that ends with “pam.” He cries out helplessly and clutches at the suit, furious. It has to come off. Now. Even if he freezes to death in the middle of the night, he needs to feel the air on his skin, needs to know that his body is still there, that he is somehow still Gordon Freeman underneath, still soft and mottled and never quite in good enough shape. To know that he still is, unlike his brother, his parents, everyone back home that he had ever loved. He wants to find and feel the scratches, the bruises, all the open sores that he knows must surely be there.

He cannot manage it, not even sure how this Mark V is put together, but Alyx senses what he’s trying to do with his desperate, clawing fingers and she holds him still.

Shut up, John.

Shut up, Gordon.

She doesn’t really say it; would never say it. No one says it. He says it.

The suit is an interlocking network of pneumatic seals, parts of it are jammed by ricocheted bullets, the release mechanisms crusted with dried blood and antlion innards. Still she manages, she knows this model well, has probably worn it many times before. Though it was a definite improvement, an expensive and shiny upgrade, this suit had still been heavily used when Gordon had stepped into it back in City 17. Stale with the scent of previous occupants, strange chemicals, irradiated fluids. Experiments in Kleiner’s lab. And a softer scent, pleasantly female; a whiff of pheromones. A smell that had immediately reminded him of sex.

While he had been trapped on an inter-dimensional train out of time, Alyx had been living his life. She had kept life warm for him.

With each unhinged piece of armor he seems to grow slightly more off balance, more and more of him exposed, an insect with the carapace pulled back, all delicate shimmering innards and tenderness. His breathing is erratic, lungs still heaving air in and out, staggered breaths. His face is wet. He feels six years old.

Finally the suit is unlocked, and Alyx reaches over his shoulders, pulls open the hidden gusset in the back of the skintight under-suit, the one open spot, this way out. It is awkward, definitely a two-person job, but finally he is free. Sweat-soaked and reeking of filth, but free. The air hits his skin like a slap and he coughs painfully, every hair on his body standing on end. He wears only the basic underthings available in City 17; a white A-Shirt and briefs, worn-out socks. Like a derelict grandfather.

That smell again. It is strong, stronger than ever, a humid, almost overwhelming stink that oozes from her sweat. It says woman, it says willing, it reeks of impatience. He can’t breathe, not deeply, not that scent. Consuming such an unguarded part of her seems like a violation, like he’s not allowed.

Alyx is handing over something, it takes him a moment to realize what. His glasses. It is the first time he has felt her skin with bare fingertips, and her hands are cold. It sobers him. She tries to reach for something else, clothes probably, or a blanket, but he will not let go. He does not put the glasses back on, not really wanting to see her expression as she takes him in, he can already feel the weight of her gaze as she looks. Knobby legs with what his college girlfriend once called “dangerously pointy” kneecaps, a slightly disappointing gut, weak shoulders, bad posture. A Black Mesa body; the body of a man who spends most of his time staring at readouts and pushing a cart. It is not an appropriate time to be self-conscious, but he is wearing used, worn-out underwear and has been sweating for days. He does not feel especially proud of himself.

“We need to hose you down,” she says. Not derisively, not because he smells - though he does, and strongly, a primal echo of her own odor - but because that is standard procedure. OSHA. He drops her hands.

All business now, their roles suddenly reversed, she sets to work on getting them through the night. Cleans her arm on an old rag, lights the lanterns, starts the heaters, cracks a few heat pads and drapes them across the exposed pipes - easy to access, he suspects, for just this reason - opens the taps in the vain hope that there is any liquid water left in any direction. She does an incredible trick with gasoline and clears the chimney of twenty years of snow, in ten minutes there is a fire. Gordon just sits and watches, stripped of his usefulness.

A bit of fiddling reveals that gas is still trickling into the old stove. By some incredible miracle - perhaps owing to the earliness of the season - the water tower must still have liquid inside, and the taps start running weakly. After rummaging through the cabinets, she digs up a few large dented stew pots and dutifully fills them with water, sets them boiling. She wanders into the bathroom with the electric heaters, poses them next to the old claw bathtub, cranks the filaments to high. The toilet works, another miracle.

He wonders what on earth she is doing before realizing with a jolt like a taser to the spine; she is drawing him a bath.

It takes a good amount of time for the water to boil, and by then the main room of the house has warmed considerably. It is a well insulated fortress, and it doesn’t take much fire to heat the cramped interior. Even sitting there in his skivvies, he feels pink in the face, red in the toes. He watches Alyx hauling loads of hot water into the bathroom, her face rusty-rosy warm, a bit of light back in her eyes. She’s careful not to scald herself, and the water pours frothy and steaming into the tub, invitingly. She does this again. And again. Water in the pots, wait for the boil, haul into the bathroom. It is time-consuming and labor-intensive, yet he feels strangely that if he were to stand up and try to help, she would tell him no.

She does not say a word. Very unlike her, to be so reserved, but it is the kind of silence that has nothing to do with an awkward lack of things to say. Rather, a necessary quiet, a stage to set the complexity of her intentions towards him. This is the layered framework of their cooperation, a shared experience so horrific and cruel as to be self-explanatory.

Finally, she determines that the bath is ready, pours the last load of water, turns off the stove.

“Company policy.” she says. He cannot tell if she’s joking, there is something strange in her voice, and her eyes don’t quite look at him. Through him, around him, the space to all sides of him. Analyzing, it seems, his dimensional capacity, but not his face.

When he doesn’t move from the couch, he half expects her to motion him towards the bathroom with a sort of inclination of the head and arms, boss-like, the section supervisor. Instead she crosses the room about half-way and holds out her hand.

“C’mon, employees only.”

He’s not sure what that means, but it sounds like a joke, like she’s trying, like she wants him to cross that other half-a-room and take her hand. So he does. She walks him to the bathtub where the water is still steaming and shuts the door, as if someone might walk in.

She stays.

It seems her mind has already been made up, probably miles ago, probably the minute she heard him scream her name as if he had been shot in the knee. She doesn’t even pause to explain, just shrugs off her parka, her jacket, her Black Mesa sweatshirt. He notices now that the logo is spray-painted, a hand-made tribute. Black Mesa had never made sweatshirts. Gordon knows this firsthand, because John had stubbornly asked him for one.

Fleetingly he wonders if it is somehow blasphemous to think about his dead brother at a time like this, but as Alyx strips down to her underwear - dirty, plain, and utilitarian as his own - he can see in her face that she is thinking about Eli, and that it is the right thing to do. To remember those people that they love above themselves, to remember their families, the human connections that the Combine has extinguished without remorse. Now that they are alone and exposed and open to each other, what else can they do? It cannot be wrong, suddenly remembering with a great wave of relief all of those things that had once been boring, everyday occupations. Smiling, laughing, shoving John’s head into a toilet, whispering into Breen’s office through an air duct, catching Kleiner’s toupee during a windy commencement speech.

The gleam in Eli’s eye when he had called Gordon son.

It is that thought that lingers as Alyx lifts her athletic bra over her head, lowers her briefs from her hips, stands right in front of him dirty and calm and naked. The last thing she removes is her headband.

It is his turn now, he realizes, his half of the conversation, the time to say “I agree.”

Out of the socks, the shirt, the raggedy underwear, not hurried, not slow. An acquiescence.

Neither of them reaches out, instead they are doing something with their eyes. A strange communion between two people too filthy and blood-covered for an embrace. A kind of kiss of its own, a drinking in of the other, an open acceptance of the sloppiness of their bodies.

He leans down and sticks his hand in the bath, a bit suddenly. It is hot, very hot, his glasses fog over and a pool of grime trails his arm as he dips his hand deeper. The water is not very deep; but it is hot and hand-made and a satisfying fulfillment of expectation, and that is more than he can say about anything that has happened in quite some time.

One foot in, two. Layers of heat, almost cool near the bottom where the enamel has sucked out the warmth. He doesn’t like the thought of lying down and ruining this hard-earned water, and the tub is too small for that anyway - too small, just like everything else in this house - so he stands. She follows his lead, steps into the tub slowly, standing at his back. One foot, two. Naturally she has thought ahead, has set out a few limp and sad-looking hand towels. Even a bar of soap. The soap has lasted where humanity has not, as if the world had harbored some independent desire to be cleansed.

He can feel her bending over, is hyper aware of the closeness of her face to the small of his back, knows what that view must be, thinks vaguely, Oh God. Suddenly, her hand on his hip, she is steadying herself. The left hand, the clean one, lightly curving over the jut of his pelvic bone, the heel of her hand pressing in. She loads a washcloth with soap, the water drips loudly, rudely, interrupting, but her hand doesn’t move.

Then a squeeze, and water rushes over his head, the towel digs in, the dirt comes off. It all comes back in a rush, like a sudden drunkenness. He remembers - not understanding how he had ever forgotten - the way showers feel, the luxury of cleanliness, the happily casual regularity of waking up in the morning and being new. She alternates, his back, her front, joined together even in this small informality. Between tending to herself she washes the whole length of him, top to bottom, stem to stern. When she brings the cloth over the lean, not-exactly-luxurious curve of his backside, he panics for a moment, wonders what the hell he should do, but already she has moved on, and he realizes it doesn’t matter.

It makes him comprehend - sort of with a bang, the way it feels when he bashes his head into a cabinet - that she loves him, and that he loves her, and that somehow they have skipped right past civilian formalities like dating and kissing and hand-holding, moved straight into the senility of wiping each other's asses because really, how else could it have gone?

She loads the soap again, her hair brushing against his back as she bends, stands, brings the cloth to the front of his body. He doesn’t turn, because to turn would be to sacrifice this new closeness as she folds around him, her breasts against his back, the jittery tickle of her pubic hair on his skin, a hint of her sex so intimate and tantalizing that his head falls back and he presses a bristled cheek into her temple. She presses back, her face connecting with the stretch of his neck and shoulder; cheek, nose, chin. She opens her mouth and breathes, he can feel the solid wetness of her teeth nearby.

She kisses him strangely, half breath, half bite on the corner of his jaw, an unshaven, haggard place that isn’t even clean. Her breath is uneven and very very warm. Moist. He feels movement in her pelvis. Sensing that something is about to give way, he makes a strange sound in the back of his ruined throat and yanks the cloth from her hand, sweeps it over his face. More soap, more water. Quickly. Get this over with. Bending, he deposits his glasses on the floor in a sudsy puddle and then turns, face-to-face with her thighs, and he is done for.

It is some kind of primate instinct, the way his face drifts into her, cheek to her thigh, lips to her skin. His arms wind around her legs, hands finding her buttocks; large, firm. She flexes involuntarily and he feels that motion in his palm, feels the clenching of the biggest muscle in her body, God she is strong.

The water is getting cloudy now, but their skin is passable. Not quite clean, not the way a picky grandparent might like it, but the stink is gone, and with it the grimy aura of death. All he can see now is living flesh, the caramel landscape of her body, gorgeous and golden and unkempt. He’s not really sure what he’s doing; half-drunk on insomnia as he is, but his teeth roam over her belly, fingers dig into the meat of her, clutching, requiring. He still has the washcloth and he drenches her with it, runs his fingers through the streams of water that rivulet across her skin, everything warm, everything soft. She staggers a little, he guides her by the hips so that she is perched on the edge of the bath, one hand clutching the towel rack nearby. Her thighs crack a little, a wave of heat radiates over his face, along with that aroma, that essence of her. Shaking a little, he runs his hands along her hips, the deep joint of her groin, admiring the wild growth of hair, a place untamed. His breathing is audible. She jerks.

“Gordon...”

He is doubled over, intoxicated. He looks up, face pressed inseparably against her thigh.

“I... I-I haven’t been with...”

Anyone. The unsaid just hanging there, motionless.

Ever?

Stillness, one hand quiet against her hip, the other cupped against her sheltered groin. A pause; protective. He cannot quite believe what has been said, not from a woman like Alyx, who seems so whole, so present in herself. Years of fighting and nearly dying and living on adrenaline, surrounded by muscled, brave men fighting for their lives. There is no way that he outstrips her in this mundane capacity; him, a dull, near-sighted research assistant with a slouch and a grand-total of three ex-girlfriends to his credit. Surely there was someone she had loved, who had loved her back, some frantic battle-weary liaison. In a world ruled by suppression fields and chemicals in the water, the first act of rebellion was to sneak off into some unruly wilderness and fuck. Orwell, all over again.

Disbelief must be easy to read, because she shakes her head, lowers her eyes, huffs out a breath. There is a tension, as if she expects him to stop, to be embarrassed, to say I don’t want to hurt you. But Alyx has seen too much pain to be a virgin, even if she is, and Gordon has damaged his voice enough for one day, so he makes no remark. Just presses back into her, continues the trek of his hands along her edges. Straightens up, follows the line of symmetry along the center of her body. Navel, sternum, the groove of her collar, the column of her neck. Her face. His vision is just good enough that he can see her when he’s this close. Her eyes lidded and somewhat expectant, nostrils flaring. Her mouth supple, open, showing just a sliver of tooth. He can’t look away and she must notice, because she licks her lips nervously, then kisses him.

The world collapses into a singularly and all he can feel is her mouth. Soft, wet, her lips slightly chilled. It lights a fire in him, a match to a pilot light, and he melds against her with teeth, with tongue, with a hand in her hair, his breath ragged and loud through his nose. She locks her hands into his scalp, her hips opening, knees framing him, her heel sliding into the ninety-degree angle of the back of his knee. Intimate. Unusual. He wonders how strange his mouth must feel to her with his thin lips and overgrown beard, his hellish refugee breath. Rough, probably. Maybe a little violent. But she moans, wraps her legs around him, jerks involuntarily against him until he can feel her moisture on his stomach.

Woman. Willing. Impatient.

He shifts his angle against her mouth, clumsily fumbles with his right hand and maneuvers with some difficulty between the heaving pressure of their bodies, seeking out the very center of her with his fingers. Oh God she is wet, the wettest, like some primordial tide come to sweep him away. One finger, two, and then he can barely stand it, the way she feels, clamping down on him eagerly, sucking, pulling, opening for more. He has to bite her chin to keep from damaging her fragile mouth with enthusiasm.

She wasn’t lying, he can feel the tautness inside her, the involuntary shrinking of the muscles, the nervousness riding alongside her pleasure. Ah, but this is an easy fix, he thinks, a simple matter of scientific application. Suddenly punch-drunk and black-eyed with sex, he curves his fingers, spreads them, stretches her slowly, works inside her. And there, just against the pad of his middle finger, the trigger, the gateway. A bit of pressure and a rhythmic thrusting of his joints. Her face changes. An expression almost like confusion, but not quite, like a realization, an epiphany. He buries his face in the tense ribbon of her neck, then trailing, dragging, works his way to her breast. Kissing her, biting her, breathing heavily, disbelievingly, as if the world is evaporating.

Her pelvic floor is loosening, he can dig a little deeper now, more pressure, more movement, sliding in and out of her with each stroke, she is close, and he is desperate to see her transform; unfurled, radiating. His thumb comes down on her clitoris, insistent, hard, and the fingers inside her curl, pull back, like on an industrial lever. Power, hydraulics, pressure, a fuel gauge gone mad.

She curls up like a non-newtonian fluid riding a sound-wave. The deep, secret muscles of her body grip him like a fist and she orgasms, loud and long and lovely as fuck. She moans his name and demands his lips, her tongue suddenly a wild, craving thing that feverishly explores the volume of his mouth.

He’s hard as diamond, an interlocking lattice of carbon atoms that cannot be shattered, and his only sane thought as she twitches and liquefies around his fingers is that they need to get out of the bathtub. It only takes a minute, leading her out of the bathroom with desperate, breathless certainty, their mouths hardly separating, the contact only breaking when she grabs a flannel blanket from the table and spreads it sloppily across the floor.

The living room is boiling now, the fire at a furious peak, and he can feel sweat breaking out. All that work and here they are filthy again, but a good filth, a coating of ecstasy, of love. He’s not sure how or when but she’s on the floor with her heels digging into his back and he’s spread across her, fingers already inside her again, making sure.

A litany of yes whispering from her mouth. Now. Yes. He swallows her pleas, covering her mouth with his, a devouring kiss, a promise. It’s easier than he thinks, to slide into her, to pry her apart and join together. A noise of his own; soft, captured, enveloped. It must hurt, but she is tough and practical and clearly doesn’t care, she pulls him deeper and cries out, wants more. He presses, not moving much, not thrusting, but driving deeper, deeper than deep, hitting that same trigger inside, bang bang bang.

Her muscles are shifting around him, tectonic, and it doesn’t take long. He almost can’t stand it; she’s so focused, so pleasured, her eyes clamped shut, her mouth gaping and shameless, like she’s dreaming, like she’s going to die. He finds himself whispering, finds that he can, and it doesn’t hurt too much. It seems fair, somehow. If he is damaging her in some small way, that he should be damaged in return. It’s stupid that after so much silence there is only one thing to say, but now that he finally has his voice again he can only moan one worn-out useless thing, over and over and over again, into her ear, into her mouth, into the bony gap between her breasts.

I love you.

I love you I love you I love you I love you.

* * *

By morning it is cold again, and their clothes are back on. Gordon can barely look at the HEV, let alone crawl back into it, so he drags it to the chopper, wearing a bland civilian blend of jeans and winter gear, clothing with folds and seams and room to be human. They clear their equipment from the cabin and straighten things out, put the place back as it was, as if it matters, as if someone cares. It is an important illusion to maintain.

He hauls a smallish pack of gear to the helicopter, unable to lift great generous loads without the suit to help him. Almost done, ready to move on, ready to find that ghost ship and rip open more gateways to Hell. It is not a happy prospect, but it is the only choice to make. He walks one final time to the house, pokes his head in the door to make sure they’ve got it all, to see what is taking Alyx so long to bring the last load, and he pales.

She is staring into the one room they never checked, never even thought to check, the most private and personal place in any house. The bedroom.

She is motionless, struck dumb, and he worries crazily that she’s staring down another wolf, or some stranger, wilder creature bent on consuming her whole. A few short strides and he’s at her shoulder, seeing what she sees.

Human bodies on a modest bed, too small for all three. Three people gathered together, a family portrait, a bed-time story. Papa bear, mama bear, and clutched between them, there is baby. They are twenty years dead and bizarrely decomposed in the cold; their presence grim and terrible. None of them have faces. There is a gun and three conjoined poses of abandonment, of surrender.

Alyx creaks like a rusty hinge, and then she shakes, her hand quickly clapping over her mouth, but she cannot stop the tears, it is too late. Gordon grabs the knob and pulls the door shut. Not slow, not fast. Another acquiescence.

The entire world has been abandoned.


End file.
